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Case Study - How to Beat Google and Rank #2 for Viagra

This entry was written by one of our members and submitted to our YouMoz section.The author's views below are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz.

I have been following the keyword "Viagra" lately and have noticed a website creep up the ranking ladder. Most of the sites do belong on the front page of Google, such as: Viagra.com, Wikipedia, howstuffworks, etc.

So... I was wondering how did http://www.sildenafilcitrate.com rank for the keyword "Viagra" and stay on top of the Google search results for the past 2+ weeks?

I thought maybe that was a fluke and all of the other links were clean? Nope, many sites that link to sildenafilcitrate have the same/similar div tag injection on their websites, which makes the link is invisible to users. They probably have thousands of sites (among their 8,000+ links) like this linking to them. Here is some research I found on this black hat tactic.

So...why would sildenafilcitrate.com do this? Well, let’s see:

According to wordtracker - 4,067 search "Viagra" each day (approximately). The second position will receive about 12% (according to AOL's data) of the click-throughs. So one week = 3,416 click-throughs. Let's say that the conversion rate is 5%, which would equal about 171 orders online. This, of course, is only a rough estimate and does not take into consideration the long-tail keywords. Overall, they make a crap load of money and provide users with another spamming Viagra website.

So...that is how you beat Google and rank #2 for the keyword "Viagra."

I hope you found this case study useful, and that you leave your thoughts on this tactic.

43 Comments

What amazes me the most is that Cutts and his team haven't manually removed that site already. I mean, "Viagra" has to be one of the most-spammed words in existence, right?

By letting a site spam its way to the top--especially when so many other spammers are monitoring those SERPs--isn't Google essentially promoting this blackhat technique to all the other spammers? It kind of sends a message like:

Attention spammers! This site is making thousands of dollars a day because they hacked WP blogs and inserted hidden links! Shouldn't YOU be hacking WP blogs too? Act now, offer expires soon!

Sometimes I wonder if Matt's department has any other employees in it besides just him.

The top links all seem to be from WordPress sites. Seems likely these sites were hacked. You don't always have to demolish a site once you've hacked it - here's a nice way to leverage it for SEO without the webmaster even knowing they've been hacked.

Keep an eye on that website. If someone at Google notices this post I'm sure the site will get a serious spanking in short fashion.

As I mentioned above, it looks like Sildenafilcitrate dot com just got hit with a penalty. Looks like they are not ranking for anything above the 30 mark, which would pretty much kill their traffic now.

I have already reported the issue to Googel via their spam report tolls link about a site which rank in google.com & co.uk but Google has not paid any heedsso i think they just want to say we do clean and give best results but in reality the TRUTH IS DIFFERENT. I think if this way the listing continues then one day all ETHICAL WAYS followers woudl have to divert to BLACK HAT SEO. and also new search engine will overtake and will abolish Google as Harappan civilization was wiped out.

Good post.. But it looks like Google doesn't care about blackhat SEOs.

I know there are 100s of sites managed by a reputed SEO company using hidden div tags to link between the sites/doorwaypages hosted by them. And I can see these sites always rank in top 20 for the main keywords. These links never appear for the user or sometimes these doorway pages/sites doesn't even belong to same industry. The number of hidden links are always less than 20.

And all these high ranking pages are like splash pages/doorway pages to the main websites. I belive Google didn't peanalize them because all these pages taht are internally linked belongs to same domain however they act as doorway pages to other websites.

Do you think it's a blackhat SEO technique? If anyone wants to dig further on these sites for research or analysis let me know, I can message you privately.

Its funny i was watching one of Matt Cutt's youtube videos where he mentioend that GOOGLE can now read javascript content, and he demonstrates this by showing an example of a javascript that hides links.So whats going on?

Is Matt simply now actinig purely as a PR person for GOOGLE? He has such a high reputation now, that most SEO's believes every word he says.Maybe GOOGLE can't read javascript as we are lead to believe.

Is it a conspiracy? Has anyone experiemented with Javascript and GOOGLEbot?

Indeed this is an unfair treatment by Google. Imagine us, SEO guys trying to follow the rules that they, (search engines) set from the developments that they deploy toiling hard for our projects week after week, trying to figure out everything for our site to rank.

Then there is one SEO black hat practitioner violating these measures we follow for our site to be more search engine friendly, ranking higher than ours.

It just sucks, we should have done the much easier and faster way to go to the top, which is the black hat techniques in the first place.

Damn Google, you should have not make us believe if you cannot do this perfectly.

This link building technique has been around for a while, sites that use it normally get banned within 3 months, which is not quick enough. The tactic is widespread and I have even seen some SEO companies using it, but have not had time to check to what extent.

Which link buidling technique? I'm joking - obviously you mean what's in thebody of the post, yet the post itself is a great example of grey, and is in use a lot. Need a backlink to a site that doesn't deserve one...say something bad about it. A standard promotional practice outside the SEO field - and usually very effective.

Well put Darren! I assume I was not the first person to see how and why this website was ranking so high. I thought it was an interesting case study for others on how some spammers are getting away with blatant blackhat. As you mentioned Daren, looks like Google promotes this practice.

seomoz just gave followed, related (word v*agr* all over the page) and very authoritative link to such spammy site

stuprice is registered seomoz member since last week, never gave any comment on this board, but posted to youmoz about v*agr* giving followed, related (word v*agr* all over the page) and very authoritative link to such spammy site

What I like about Seomoz is that it gives the average guy/girl a way to express their thought. This post is not meant to give the spammy site an authoritative link, but to show how one site is using a blackhat practice and getting away with it.

This post is not meant to give the spammy site an authoritative link, but to show how one site is using a blackhat practice and getting away with it.

I think you're trying to express yourself as a naive guy, but it seems you're very experienced webmaster.

If you wanted to show us this practice it would be a way better to write "sildenafilcitrate DOT com" instead of real dofollow link.

I don't mind if it's "cheap used cars" or "buy v*iag*a" (as long as it's medicine selling with prescription, but in this particular case it isn't). What I see as a problem here is that they hacked several 1000's of innocent sites and injected their piece of code.

Without this link your post would be AWESOME, but now with this link it looks out like pure spam and you looks out as a pure spammer.

Is this first time you helped such sites to rank better or you're doing it regularly?

take heart, one of the main reasons hat people are questioning this is because you have appeared as a brand new community member and posted a link to a viagra site. if you're a spammer you will disappear once the chat around this post stops. If you're not you will hang around and continue to contribute to the community.

Either way it will be your behaviour that tips the balance not what anyone here says.

ok, the post itself is great, you send them 1 position up for a day, today are they 40+ postions down-

few days ago I thumbed your post down, actual ratio is 14/3, now I'm going to change my mind and it will be 15/3

if you're average guy, as you said, you will keep commenting and posting to youmoz, for sure. If it's about some particular site or resource feel free link to it. But if you're writing about hackers who are robbing our sites try to point to it somehow else.

The links to the Viagra site are definitely not nofollowed (at least a few). Really need to clean that up.

Nice article though. Its increasingly rare that you see a viagra spammer injecting links directly to their money site, usually they spam links to a page on a high authority domain (forum, linkedin, etc) which they then fill with links to the money site.

ah man, 2 follow links for "Viagra" nice work, but i think we will see this fun little injection attack soon again.

It might not be a Wordpress website next time as automatic are usually pretty good on that front but if you have a link for some software you can use to scan your blog/website for such attacks it would be useful if you could post it here...

I am the creator of the LosingLucy site mentioned in this article. I was very surprised to find the viagra link on my site just a short time ago.

The link was embedded in my theme, which I got for free from http://wptemplates.org/.

I was very upset to find this link on my site. It was really hard to get rid of it too. It was not obvious in the theme. There was a lot of stuff that was unintelligible to read and yet was needed to make the theme work. I finally got rid of it by trial and error.

I find it highly unethical of wptemplates.org to do this without letting people know. The 2 links in the footer were visible and ok with me, but I did not know about the viagra link in the header, or I would not have chosen that theme!

Looks like they did get penalized. I give them credit for doing it and doing well for a while, but now what.

The question this brings to mind is that if they did this and it worked and then they got banned to get back in googles searches they would need to fix what they did wrong which would be to remove the codes from the sites. Is that possible once people are already using the theme?

Damn - could do with some of that stuff as well. Last time i tried one it got stuck in my throat and i ended up with a stiff neck for two days.........crickets chirp.......tumbleweed rolls past.........i'll get my coat.

Yep, they just got owned.. I'm sure this is a manual penalty, there been much talk of this domain over the last few days. I'm sure someone brought it to Matt's attention.Worth noting that their pagerank is still uneffected from the recent Google toolbar PR update.

I just noticed that the domain sildenafilcitrate dot com is no longer being indexed in Google (you will no longer find them in the google index for any keywords). Looks like Google took a hard stance on this and not just manually penalized them but removed them from their index.